The history of Spain and Portugal, from the foundation of their respective monarchies to the middle of the sixteenth century, when both countries attained their highest point of greatness, is eminently heroic, for the persevering spirit with which they warred against the Moors, never ceasing and scarcely breathing from the contest till they had finally exterminated them; and for the splendour, the extent, and the importance of their foreign conquests. Both kingdoms had risen by the same virtues; the same vices brought on the decline of both; and the history of their decline is not less instructive than that of their rise. Their external relations have been widely different; but notwithstanding this difference, and notwithstanding a national enmity, kept alive rather by old remembrances and mutual pride than by the frequency of their wars with each other, the Spaniards and Portugueze have continued to be morally and intellectually one people. They spring from the same stock; the same intermixture of races has taken place among them; and their national character has been formed by similar circumstances of climate, language, manners, and institutions.

The old governments are called free, like all those which the Teutonic tribes established; but this freedom was little better than a scheme of graduated tyranny, and the laws upon which it was founded were only so many privileges which the conquerors reserved or arrogated to themselves. When the commixture of languages and nations was complete, and commerce had raised up a class of men who had no existence under the feudal system, a struggle for political liberty ensued throughout all the European kingdoms. It was soon terminated in Spain: a good cause was ruined by the rashness and misconduct of its adherents; and the scale, after it had been borne down by the sword of the sovereign, never recovered its equipoise: for the Romish church leagued itself with the monarchical authority, against whose abuse it had formerly been the only bulwark; but changing its policy now according to the times, it consecrated the despotism whereby it was upheld in its own usurpations. The effects of this double tyranny were not immediately perceived; but in its inevitable consequences it corrupted and degraded every thing to which it could extend, ... laws, morals, industry, literature, science, arts, and arms.

In other countries where absolute monarchy has been established, and the Romish superstition has triumphed, both have been in some degree modified by the remains of old institutions, the vicinity of free states, and the influence of literature and manners. But in Spain and Portugal almost all traces of the ancient constitution had been effaced; and as there existed nothing to qualify the spirit of popery, a memorable example was given of its unmitigated effects. The experiment of intolerance was tried with as little compunction as in Japan, and upon a larger scale. Like the Japanese government, the Inquisition went through with what it began; and though it could not in like manner secure its victory, by closing the ports and barring the passes of the Peninsula, it cut off, as much as possible, all intellectual communication with the rest of the world.

The courts of Madrid and Lisbon were as despotic as those of Constantinople and Ispahan. They did not, indeed, manifest their power by acts of blood, because the reigning families were not cruel, and cruelty had ceased to be a characteristic of the times: but with that cold, callous insensibility to which men are liable, in proportion as they are removed from the common sympathies of humankind, they permitted their ministers to dispense at pleasure exile and hopeless imprisonment, to the rigour and inhumanity of which death itself would have been mercy. ♦Mal-administration of the laws.♦ The laws afforded no protection, for the will of the minister was above the laws; and every man who possessed influence at court violated them with impunity, and procured impunity for all whom he chose to protect. Scarcely did there exist even an appearance of criminal justice. Quarrels among the populace were commonly decided by the knife: he who stabbed an antagonist or an enemy in the street wiped the instrument in his cloak, and passed on unmolested by the spectators, who never interfered farther than to call a priest to the dying man. When it happened that a criminal was thrown into prison, there he remained till it became necessary to make room for a new set of tenants: the former were then turned adrift; or, if their crimes had been notorious and frequent, they were shipped off to some foreign settlement.

After the triumph of the monarchical power, the Cortes had fallen first into insignificance, then into disuse1. There was no legislative body; the principle of the government being, that all laws and public measures of every kind were to proceed from the will and pleasure of the sovereign. ♦Condition of the nobles.♦ Men of rank, therefore, if they were not in office, had no share in public business; and their deplorable education rendered them little fit either to improve or enjoy a life of perfect leisure. It is said also to have been the system of both governments, while they yet retained some remains of perverted policy, to keep the nobles in attendance about the court, where they might be led into habits of emulous extravagance, which would render them hungry for emoluments, and thereby dependent upon the crown. The long-continued moral deterioration of the privileged classes had produced in many instances a visible physical degeneracy; and this tendency was increased by those incestuous marriages, common in both countries, which pride and avarice had introduced, and for which the sanction of an immoral church was to be purchased.

The armies partook of the general degradation. The forms of military power existed like the forms of justice: but they resembled the trunk of a tree, of which the termites have eaten out the timber, and only the bark remains. There appeared in the yearly almanacks a respectable list of regiments, and a redundant establishment of officers: but, brave and capable of endurance as the Portugueze and Spaniards are, never were there such officers or such armies in any country which has ranked among civilized nations. Subalterns might be seen waiting behind a chair in their uniforms, or asking alms in the streets; and the men were what soldiers necessarily become, when, without acquiring any one virtue of their profession, its sense of character and of honour, its regularity, or its habits of restraint, they possess all its license, and have free scope for the vices which spring up in idleness. Drawn by lot into a compulsory service, ill-disciplined, and ill-paid, they were burthensome to the people, without affording any security to the nation.

The state of religion was something more hopeful, though it is scarcely possible to imagine any thing more gross than the idolatry, more impudent than the fables, more monstrous than the mythology of the Romish church, as it flourished in Spain and Portugal. Wherever this corrupt church is dominant, there is no medium between blind credulity and blank, hopeless, utter unbelief: and this miserable effect tends to the stability of the system which has produced it, because men who have no religion accommodate themselves to whatever it may be their interest to profess. The peasantry and the great mass of the people believed with implicit and intense faith whatever they were taught. The parochial clergy, differing little from the people in their manner of life, and having received an education so nearly worthless that it can scarcely be said to have raised them above the common level, were for the most part as superstitious and as ill-informed as their flock. ♦Improvement of the higher clergy.♦ The higher clergy, however, had undergone a gradual and important change, which had not been brought about by laws or literature, but by the silent and unperceived influence of the spirit of the times. While their principle of intolerance remained the same (being inherent in popery, and inseparable from it), the practice had been greatly abated; and the autos-da-fe, the high festival days of this merciless idolatry, were at an end: for it was felt and secretly acknowledged, that these inhuman exhibitions were disgraceful in the eyes of Europe, and had brought a stain upon the character of the peninsular nations in other catholic countries, and even in Rome itself. The persecution of the Jews therefore (which the founder of the Braganzan line would never have permitted if he had been able to prevent it) ceased; and the distinction between Old and New Christians had nearly disappeared. At the same time, an increased intercourse with heretical states, the power and prosperity of Great Britain, and the estimation in which the British character is held wherever it is known, had insensibly diminished, if not the abhorrence in which heresy was held, certainly the hatred against heretics. Thus the habitual feelings of the clergy had been modified, and they were no longer made cruel by scenes of execrable barbarity, which in former times compelled them to harden their hearts. They became also ashamed of those impostures upon which so large a portion of their influence had been founded: though they did not purge their kalendar, they made no additions to it; miraculous images were no longer discovered: when a grave-digger, in the exercise of his office, happened to find a corpse in a state of preservation, no attempt was made to profit by the popular opinion of its sanctity: miracles became less frequent as they were more scrupulously examined; and impostures2, which, half a century ago, would have been encouraged and adopted, were detected, exposed, and punished. The higher clergy in both countries were decorous in their lives, and in some instances exemplary in the highest degree.

To the monastic orders the influence of the times had been less beneficial. There were ages during which those institutions produced the greatest blessings in Europe; when they kept alive the lamp of knowledge, mitigated barbarian manners, and carried the light of Christianity among a race of ferocious conquerors. These uses had long since gone by; and the dissolution of the Jesuits had extinguished the missionary spirit which that extraordinary society had provoked in its rivals, and by which it had itself almost atoned to humanity and to religion for its own manifold misdeeds. The wealthy orders still afforded a respectable provision for the younger sons of old or opulent families; the far more numerous establishments of the mendicants were more injuriously filled from the lower classes. The peasant who was ambitious of seeing a son elevated above the rank in which he was born, destined him for a friar; and he who was too idle to work, or who wished to escape from military service, took shelter in the habit. The mendicant orders were indeed a reproach to Catholicism, and a pest to the countries wherein they existed; they contributed not only to keep the people ignorant, but to render them profligate. Yet even among the Franciscans men were found, who, by their irreproachable conduct, their sincere though misdirected piety, and sometimes by their learning and industrious lives, preserved the order from the contempt into which it would otherwise have fallen even among the vulgar. The nunneries of every description produced nothing but evil, except in those cases where persons went into them by their own choice, who in Protestant countries would have been consigned to a Bedlam.

Literature had revived in both kingdoms, and was flourishing, notwithstanding the restraints which the government and the Inquisition continued to impose. Few similar institutions have equalled the Royal Academies of Madrid and Lisbon in the zeal and ability with which they have brought to light their ancient records, and elucidated the history and antiquities of their respective countries. There was one most important subject from which men of letters were compelled to refrain ... the old free constitution: but it met them every where in their researches; and its restoration was the object of their wishes, if not of their hopes.

The lower classes, who in great cities are every where too generally depraved, were perhaps peculiarly so in Spain, from the effect of what may be called their vulgar, rather than their popular, literature. This had assumed a curious and most pernicious character, arising partly from the disregard in which ill-executed laws must always be held, and partly from the faith of the people in the efficacy of absolution. The ruffian and the bravo were the personages of those ballads which were strung for sale along dead walls in frequented streets, and vended by blind hawkers about the country. In these pieces, which, as they were written by men in low life for readers of their own level, represent accurately the state of vulgar feeling, the robberies and murders which the hero commits are described as so many brave exploits performed in his vocation; and, at the conclusion, he is always delivered over safely to the priest, but seldom to the hangman. Fables of a like tendency were not unfrequently chosen by their dramatists for the sake of flattering some fashionable usage of superstition, such as the adoration of the cross and the use of the rosary; and the villain who, in the course of the drama, has perpetrated every imaginable crime, is exhibited at the catastrophe3 as a saint by virtue of one of these redeeming practices. Such works were more widely injurious in their tendency than any of those which the Inquisition suppressed. They infected the minds of the people; and the surest course by which a coxcomb in low life could excite admiration and envy among his compeers was by appearing habitually to set justice at defiance. It became a fashion among some of the higher classes in Spain to imitate4 these wretches; and, by a stranger and more deplorable perversion of nature, women were found among those of distinguished rank, who affected the dress and the manners of the vilest of their sex. No such depravity was known in Portugal: the court set an example of decorum and morality there; and as there were fewer large towns, in proportion to the size of the kingdom, there was consequently less corruption among the people.

Travellers, forming their hasty estimate from the inhabitants of sea-ports and great cities, have too generally agreed in reviling the Portugueze and Spaniards; but if they whose acquaintance with these nations was merely superficial have been disposed to depreciate and despise them, others who dwelt among them always became attached to the people, and bore willing and honourable testimony to the virtues of the national character. It was indeed remarkable how little this had partaken of the national decay. The meanest peasant knew that his country had once been prosperous and powerful; he was familiar with the names of its heroes; and he spake of the days that were past with a feeling which was the best omen for those that were to come.

Such was the moral and intellectual state of the peninsular kingdoms toward the close of the eighteenth century. There was not the slightest appearance of improvement in the principles of the government or in the administration of justice; but, if such a disposition had arisen, no nations could have been in a more favourable state for the views of a wise minister and an enlightened sovereign. For the whole people were proudly and devoutly attached to the institutions of their country; there existed among them neither sects, nor factions, nor jarring interests; they were one-hearted in all things which regarded their native land; individuals felt for its honour as warmly as for their own; and obedience to their sovereign was with them equally a habit and a principle. In spite of the blind and inveterate despotism of the government, the mal-administration of the laws, and the degeneracy of the higher classes, both countries were in a state of slow, but certain, advancement; of which, increasing commerce, reviving literature, humaner manners, and mitigated bigotry were unequivocal indications. In this state they were found when France was visited by the most tremendous revolution that history has recorded, ... a revolution which was at once the consequence and the punishment of its perfidious policy, its licentiousness, and its irreligion.

It was soon seen that this revolution threatened to propagate itself throughout the whole civilised world. The European governments combined against it; their views were discordant, their policy was erroneous, their measures were executed as ill as they were planned: a master-mind was equally wanting in the cabinet and in the field. In the hour of trial the Spanish court perceived the inefficiency of its organized force; and having neither wisdom to understand the strength of the nation, nor courage and virtue to rely upon it, it concluded a disastrous war by a dishonourable peace. From that time its councils were directed by France, and its treasures were at the disposal of the same domineering ally. A war against England, undertaken upon the most frivolous pretexts, and ruinous to its interests, was the direct consequence; and when, after the experimental peace of Amiens, hostilities were renewed between France and England, Spain had again to experience the same fatal results of the dependence to which her cabinet had subjected her. Portugal had purchased peace with less apparent dishonour, because the terms of the bargain were not divulged; but there also the government soon found that in such times to be weak is to be miserable: it was compelled to brook the ostentatious insolence of the French ambassadors, and to pay large sums for the continuance of a precarious neutrality whenever France thought proper to extort them; for the system of Europe had now been overthrown, and the laws of nations were trampled under foot. A military power, more formidable than that of Rome in its height of empire, of Zingis, or of Timour, had been established in France upon the wreck of all her ancient institutions; and this power was directed by the will of an individual the most ambitious of the human race, who was intoxicated with success, and whose heart and conscience were equally callous.

Many causes combined in producing the French revolution: the example of a licentious court had spread like a pestilence through the country; impiety was in fashion among the educated classes; and the most abominable publications were circulated among the ignorant with as much zeal as if a conspiracy had actually been formed for the subversion of social order, by removing from mankind all restraints of morality, of religion, and of decency. Things were in this condition when France took part in the American war; a measure to which Louis XVI. reluctantly consented, because he felt in his heart its injustice, and had perhaps an ominous sentiment of its impolicy. The seeds of republicanism and revolution were thus imported by the government itself, and they fell upon a soil which was prepared for them. Financial difficulties increased; state quacks were called in; a legislative assembly was convoked in a kingdom where none of the inhabitants had been trained to legislation; and the fatal error was committed of uniting the three estates in one chamber, whereby the whole power was transferred to the commons. There was a generous feeling at that time abroad, from which much good might have been educed, had there been ability to have directed it, and if the heart of the country had not been corrupted. Nothing was heard except the praises of freedom and liberality, and professions of the most enlarged and cosmopolitan philanthropy. The regenerated nation even renounced for the future, all offensive war by a legislative act: they fancied that the age of political redemption was arrived, and they announced the Advent of Liberty, with peace on earth, good will towards men. They themselves seemed to believe that the Millennium of Philosophy was begun; and so in other countries the young and ardent, and the old who had learned no lessons from history, believed with them. But the consequences which Burke predicted from changes introduced with so much violence, and so little forethought, followed in natural and rapid succession. ♦Progress of the French revolution.♦ The constitutionalists, who had supposed that it is as easy to remodel the institutions of a great kingdom in practice as in theory, were driven from the stage by bolder innovators; and these in their turn yielded to adventurers more profligate and more daring than themselves. Nobility was abolished; monarchy was overthrown; the church was plundered; the clergy were proscribed; atheism was proclaimed; the king and queen were put to death, after a mockery of judicial forms; the dauphin slowly murdered by systematic ill-usage; a plaster statue of Liberty was set up in Paris; and in the course of two years more than fifteen hundred persons were beheaded at the feet of that statue, men and women indiscriminately. The frenzy spread throughout all France. In the wholesale butcheries which were reported to the National Convention, by its agents, as so many triumphs of equality and justice, not less than eighteen thousand lives were sacrificed by the executioner. It seemed as if God had abandoned the unhappy nation who had denied Him, and that they were delivered over, as the severest chastisement, to the devices of their own hearts. Before this madness was exhausted, the wretches who had thrust themselves into the government paid the earthly penalty of their guilty elevation. One faction did justice upon another: in the same place where dogs had licked the blood of Louis and his queen, there in succession did they lick the blood of Brissot, Danton, Hebert, Robespierre, and their respective associates. When the theorists, the fanatics, and the bolder villains, had perished, a set of intriguers, who had accommodated themselves in turn to all, came forward, and divided the spoil; till the unhappy nation, disgusted with such intrigues, and weary of perpetual changes, acquiesced with joy in the usurpation of a military adventurer, which promised them stability, at least, if not repose.

The revolution had given the government absolute command over the whole physical force of France; and this prodigious power was now at the disposal of an individual unchecked by any restraint, and subject to no responsibility. Perhaps it would not have been possible to have selected among the whole human race any other man, to whom it would have been so dangerous to commit this awful charge. Napoleon Buonaparte possessed all the qualities which are required to form a perfect tyrant. His military genius was of the highest order; his talents were of the most imposing kind; his ambition insatiable; his heart impenetrable: he was without honour, without veracity, without conscience; looking for no world beyond the present, and determined to make this world his own, at whatever cost. The military executions committed in Italy by his orders had shown his contempt for the established usages of war, the law of nations, and the common feelings of humanity: the suppression of the Papal government, the usurpation of the Venetian states, and the seizure of Malta, had proved that neither submissiveness nor treaties afforded any protection against this fit agent of a rapacious and unprincipled democracy. ♦His crimes in Egypt and Syria.♦ But it was during the Egyptian expedition that the whole atrocity of his character was displayed. He landed in Egypt, proclaiming that he was the friend of the Grand Seignior, and that the French were true Mussulmen, who honoured Mahommed and the Koran. His first act was to storm a city belonging to the Grand Seignior, which he never summoned to surrender, and which was incapable of defence. The butchery was continued for some hours after the resistance had ceased. The very perpetrators of this carnage have related that they put to death old and young, men, women, and children, in the mosques, whither these unoffending and helpless wretches had fled to implore protection from God and from their prophet; and they have avowed that this was done deliberately, for the purpose of astonishing the people. Thus it was that Buonaparte commenced his career in Egypt. He left Alexandria, exclaiming, “The Virtues are on our side! Glory to Allah,” he said; “there is no other God but God: Mahommed is his prophet, and I am his friend.” He proclaimed to the Egyptians that Destiny directed all his operations, and had decreed from the beginning of the world, that after beating down the Cross, he should come into that country to fulfil the task assigned him; and he called upon them to enjoy the blessings of a system, in which the wisest and the most virtuous were to govern, and the people were to be happy. It is literally true, that the Egyptian mothers mutilated or killed their daughters, to save them from the brutality of his troops; and that wherever the French moved, a flock of kites and vultures followed, sure of the repast which these purveyors every where provided for them. Their general entered Syria, took Jaffa by assault, and issued a proclamation upon its capture, professing that he would be “clement and merciful, after the example of God.” Four days after the capture, and after that profession of clemency had been made, he drew out his prisoners, some three thousand in number, and had them deliberately slaughtered. A whole division of his army was employed in this massacre; and when their cartridges were exhausted, they finished the work with the bayonet and the sword, dragging away those who had expired, in order to get at the living, who, in the hope of escaping death, had endeavoured to hide themselves under the bodies of the dead. To complete this monster’s character, it was only needful that he should show himself as inhuman toward his own soldiers as his prisoners; and that it might be complete in all parts, this proof of his disposition was not wanting. When Sir Sidney Smith and Captain Wright, then Sir Sidney’s lieutenant, compelled him to raise the siege of Acre, the sick and wounded in his army were more than he had means of removing: any other general would have recommended them to the humanity of an English enemy; but this would have been humiliating to Buonaparte, and therefore poison was administered to them by his orders.

Yet this man, like Augustus, had an opportunity of earthly redemption afforded him; and, while he fabricated for himself a splendid fortune, might have deserved the gratitude of Europe, not only in the existing generation, but through after ages. When he had attained the supreme authority, he might have restored the Bourbons in France, and taken Italy for his own reward: an arrangement, for which no fresh act of injustice would have been required; which none whom it offended would have been able to oppose; and which, more than any other conceivable alteration in the state of Christendom, might have tended to the general good. Here was an object worthy of ambition, and a richer prize than military ambition had ever yet achieved: so great would have been the public benefit; so signal and durable the individual glory. Even if, incapable as he was of aiming at such true greatness, he could have contented himself with the situation in which he was recognized by the peace of Amiens, and have borne his faculties meekly in that unexampled elevation, the world is charitable to all extremes of fortune, and would have forgiven his former crimes; which, public and notorious as they were, were loudly denied by his advocates, and already disbelieved by his infatuated admirers. But the heart of Napoleon Buonaparte was evil; he regarded his fellow-creatures merely as instruments for gratifying his desire of empire, ... pieces with which he played the game of war: in the presumptuousness of his power he set man at defiance, and in his philosophy God was left out of the account. Unhappily, the internal circumstances of France accorded but too well in all things with the disposition and the views of its autocrat.

The revolutionary governments, through all their changes, had steadily pursued the favourite object of placing the military establishment of the country upon the most formidable footing, and thereby enabling France to give laws to the rest of Europe. During the first years, immense armies were filled with enthusiastic volunteers; and before that spirit exhausted itself, provision was made for permanently supporting so disproportionate a force by means of the conscription. The conscription originated in Prussia, when Prussia was under a mere military despotism; it was now carried to its utmost extent in France. The law declared that every Frenchman was a soldier, and bound to defend his country; but the principle of general law which the latter clause of the sentence announces served to introduce a code, whereby the whole youth of France were placed at the disposal of the government, to be sent whithersoever its ambitious projects might extend, ... to the sands of Egypt, or the snows of Moscovy. A view of this system will equally elucidate the strength, the resources, and the character, of the French government during these disastrous years.

Under the new arrangement of its territory, France was divided into departments, districts, cantons, and municipalities. The departments were governed by a prefect, and a council of prefecture; the districts by a sub-prefect and his council; the cantons and municipalities by a mayor and town-court; to which were added, on the part of the general government, a commissary of police, and his adjuncts. There was also a military division of the country into thirty districts, each under a general of division, with a long establishment of commissaries, inspectors, and military police-officers. On a certain day in every year, notice was given in every municipality that all men, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, should within eight days appear at the town-house, and enrol their names: if any individual failed, not he alone, but his family also, were subject to a criminal prosecution. The names of the absent were to be enrolled by their nearest relations, and concealment was thus rendered impossible: the man who was not in his usual domicile being doubly registered; as an absentee in one place, and as a temporary sojourner in another. From these registers the returns for the conscription were prepared in five lists, according to age, and the names in each were carefully arranged according to seniority. The civil officers by whom these lists were formed were responsible for any omission; and, as a farther precaution, every village and every house was visited at stated and at unexpected times, publicly and secretly. After such preparations, the machine was easily put in motion. The war-minister gave notice what number of men were required; the senate voted them from the conscripts of that year which was next in course, and the prefects were ordered to provide their contingents: they called upon the sub-prefects; these again upon the municipalities; and within sixteen days from the date of the prefect’s orders, the ballot took place. Tickets, numbered to the amount of all who were upon the list, were put into the urn, and the men were registered in the order of the numbers which they had drawn. The first numbers, up to the sum required, were for immediate service; the others were to be called upon in sequence, in case of necessity only: but, under Buonaparte, that necessity always existed. They were marched off under military escort, and distributed among the artillery, cuirassiers, dragoons, infantry, or sappers and miners, according to their stature and bodily strength.

The infirmities which might be pleaded as exemptions were severely scrutinized, and were determined by the law with critical inhumanity: inveterate asthma, habitual spitting of blood, and incipient consumption only entitled the sufferer to a provisional dispensation. Men who were incapable of enduring the fatigues of war, or who might be more useful to the state in pursuing their own employments or their studies, were allowed to provide substitutes or purchase an exemption by the payment of three hundred francs; but this was an early law, and it is not likely that the pecuniary alternative was ever accepted when the waste of men became excessive. ♦Substitutes.♦ The substitute was required to be a Frenchman, between twenty-five and forty years of age (and therefore not liable to the conscription), not below five feet one, of a strong constitution, and in robust health. In addition to his own name, he was to take that of the person for whom he served, and by that name he was to be known in the army: the principal was still upon the list, and subject to be called upon if his representative deserted or withdrew; nor could he obtain a definitive exemption unless he produced proof that the substitute had either been killed or disabled in service, or had served the full time which the laws required; during war the term was indefinite, in peace it was fixed at five years. During the latter years of Buonaparte’s government men who could be admitted as substitutes were necessarily so rare, that their price rose from two hundred to a thousand Napoleons.

No constituted authority, no branch of the civil or military administration, might retain in its service a conscript who was called upon in his turn. No Frenchman, being, or having been, liable to the conscription, could hold any public office, or receive any public salary, or exercise public rights, or receive a legacy, or inherit property, unless he produced a certificate that he had conformed to the law, and either was actually in service, or had obtained his dismissal, or was legally exempted, or that his services had not been required. They who failed to join the army within the time prescribed were deprived of their civil rights, a circular description of their persons was sent to all the chiefs of the gendarmerie throughout the empire, and they were pursued as deserters. Eleven depôts were appointed, where these refractory conscripts were disciplined in an uniform of disgrace, with the hair cut close: they were employed upon the fortifications, or in other hard labour, for which they received no additional pay or rations. This, however, was thought too lenient when the emperor’s expenditure of men became more lavish, and it was then decreed that such offenders were to be punished as if they had actually deserted. ♦Punishments for desertion.♦ A deserter was condemned to a fine of fifteen hundred francs, chargeable upon whatever property might fall to him at any future time, if he was not able to pay it immediately. In addition to this fine, the punishment for the simple offence of deserting into the interior was three years’ labour upon the public works. The culprits wore a particular uniform, and were allowed shoes; their heads were shaved every eighth day, and they were not permitted either to shave their beards or to cut them. Their rations were the soldiers’ bread, rice, or dry pulse; their pay half that of a common labourer; and of this a third was withheld till they should have served out their time, a third was deducted for their expenses, and the remainder was all which they had for purchasing better food than their miserable allowance. He who had deserted from the army, or a frontier place, or in a direction toward the enemy, or with a companion, or who had scaled ramparts in effecting his escape, was sentenced to public labour for ten years, with a bullet of eight pounds weight fastened to him by a chain eight feet long. He was to work eight hours a day during five months, ten during the better part of the year, and to be chained in prison all the rest of the time: he wore wooden shoes, and an uniform differing both in colour and fashion from that of the troops; his mustachios, as well as his head, were shaved every eight days; his beard was never shaved, nor shorn, nor shortened; his rations and pay were like those of the common deserters, because, indeed, life could not be supported upon less. The punishment of death, which was inflicted upon those who had deserted to the enemy, and in other aggravated cases, was mercy when compared to this.

By the operation of this system the French were made a military nation, a change equally inconsistent with their own welfare and with the safety and independence of the surrounding states. Beginning at first with all men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, enrolling the whole rising generation afterwards as they attained to manhood, and retaining all who were embodied as long as their services were required, in other words, as long as they were capable of serving, ... the government had thus brought within its disposal every man who was capable of bearing arms; and this was the tremendous power which Buonaparte found already organized to his heart’s desire when he assumed the supreme authority. Such power might have kindled ambition in an ordinary mind; no wonder then that the most ambitious of the human race, when he saw himself in possession of it, supposed universal empire to be within his reach. His supply of men might well appear inexhaustible: there was neither difficulty nor expense in raising them; he had only to say what number he required, and the rest was mere matter of routine. ♦War made to support itself.♦ After his armies had once passed the frontier, there was no cost in maintaining them; war was made to support itself. This system also had been matured for him by his republican predecessors. The contributions which he levied upon conquered or dependent states discharged the soldiers’ pay: in an ally’s country their subsistence was expected as a proof of alliance; in an enemy’s it was taken as the right of war. And the perfection of the French commissariat was admired and extolled in England as a masterpiece of arrangement by the blind admirers of France, who either did not or would not perceive how easy the duties of that department were made, when every demand was enforced by military power, and nothing was paid for.

When Louis XVI. began his unhappy reign, the French army was still constituted upon a feudal principle which had been well adapted to the circumstances of later times. The corps were divided into proprietary companies, the captains of which, receiving pay proportionate to the required expenditure, provided every thing for the men, and raised them among their own vassals. The system was liable to abuse, but it had great advantages: for if the captain should act upon no worthier motive than mere selfishness, it was his interest to be careful of his men, lest he should incur the expense of recruiting them; and it might reasonably be expected that he would treat them kindly to prevent desertion, and that he would spare no means for keeping them in health or restoring them in sickness. But there were better principles brought into action: the character both of the captain and of the men, in their native place, depended upon what each should report of the other; the men also knew that their fidelity would not be forgotten when their services were over, and that, if they fell, their good conduct would be remembered to the benefit of their family. Both parties were always in the presence of that little world, to the opinion of which they were more immediately amenable, and from which applause or condemnation would most sensibly affect them; and local and hereditary attachments, with all their strength and endurance, were thus brought into the service of the state. ♦Change introduced by M. de St. Germaine.♦ The system was abolished when M. de St. Germaine was minister at war, for the sake of some sordid speculations upon clothing and victualling the troops. Subalterns, who were learning their profession, and acquiring the love and confidence of the soldiers, were disbanded as a sacrifice to the prevailing fashion of economical reform: at the same time the penal discipline of the Germans was introduced, ... a poor substitution for the old bonds of feeling which had been thus rudely broken; and while all that was useful in the feudal constitution of the army was discarded, the worst part was retained by an order that no person should hold a commission unless he could prove the nobility of his family for four generations.

The republicans naturally went into the other extreme; and Buonaparte retained in his army the levelling principle which the revolution had introduced, because it is as congenial to a despotism as to a democracy. No Frenchman could be made an officer (except in the artillery and engineers) till he had served three years as a private or sub-officer, unless he signalized himself in action. Perhaps the conscription, in its full extent, could never have been established without such a regulation. It rendered the military service less odious to the common people, who saw the children of the higher classes thus placed upon a level with themselves, and who were deceived into an opinion that merit was the only means of promotion: it brought also into the ranks a degree of intelligence and ambition not to be found there in armies which are differently composed; and those qualities were a security for discipline and perfect obedience under circumstances in which ordinary troops might have become impatient of continual privations. But it may well be doubted, on the other hand, whether the officers derived any important advantage from being trained in the ranks; and there can be no doubt that any such advantage would be dearly purchased by the degradation to which they were exposed; for, while the soldiery were materially improved by the mixture of wellborn men who looked for promotion, these persons themselves were more materially injured by the inevitable effects of a system which levelled nothing so effectually as it did the manners, the moral feeling, and the sense of honour.

The policy of the old French government had often been detestably perfidious, and yet French history abounds with examples of high chivalrous sentiment; and nowhere were men to be found more sensible of what was due to their king, their country, and themselves, more alive to the sense of national and individual honour, than in the old French army. A fatal change was produced by the revolution. At a time when all persons of high birth were objects of persecution or suspicion, men from the lowest occupations were hurried into the highest posts in the army. Many of them were possessed of great military talents, and there were some few who in every respect proved worthy of their fortune. But there were others who never cast the slough of their old habits: no service was too bloody or too base for such agents; and, without feeling shame for the employment, or compunction for the crime, they were ready to obey their remorseless master in whatever he might command, ... the individual murders of Palm and the Duc d’Enghein, or the wholesale massacres of Jaffa and of Madrid, and those other atrocious actions in Portugal and Spain, of which this history records the progress and the punishment.